NLSC Your source for basketball video games.
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at my 2002 rosters for NBA Live 99.
If you weren’t around during the heyday of NBA Live modding, you might not be aware that I used to be a prolific roster modder. Inspired by the awesome work that our founders had done for the early NBA Live games on PC, I began making my own current roster updates, in particular focusing on NBA Live 96. I eventually moved on to newer games, and ended up taking over the NLSC-branded current rosters when Lutz retired. Beginning with NBA Live 2003, I spent many years creating current season updates for the latest release in the series.
However, given that I got my start in modding by updating a superseded title, and also have a predisposition for retro gaming, it’s no surprise that I was inspired to work on another older game after leaving NBA Live 96 behind. To that end, come the 2002 season, I began updating the rosters for NBA Live 99 PC, a mod you can still find in our Downloads database today. In some ways it was an unusual choice of game for me to work on, especially since it was a few years old at that point. I had my reasons though, and really enjoyed making those rosters! Let’s take a look back…way back…
Although I was part of the community here at the NLSC and running my own NBA Live fansite when NBA Live 99 PC was released, I didn’t mod the game during its lifecycle. In fact, I didn’t even play it until a couple of years after its release! I was gifted the Nintendo 64 version for Christmas 1998, but at the time, my family’s aging 486 PC could barely run NBA Live 97, let alone anything that required one of those fancy new 3D video cards! Indeed, I confirmed this firsthand when I tried to make it run the NBA Live 98 demo, which it admittedly did at less than a frame per second. Come 2000, after multiple repairs, upgrades, and even a Y2K fix, that PC finally died.
This led to my family at last getting a PC that could run games that had been released later than 1996! I celebrated the arrival of our new Pentium III PC by picking up NBA Live 2000. As a landmark release in the series, it became an instant favourite! Even then however, I was keen to add to what was a burgeoning collection of basketball video games. This led me to pick up NBA Live 98 and NBA Live 99, which were still being sold by a local computer store. It was a blast to finally get to play those games on PC, and use some of the mods that had been posted on the NLSC. Seeing as I was already into modding, it was only a matter of time before I began tinkering with them.
It wasn’t until late 2001 – with the 2002 season looming – that I seriously considered working on current rosters for NBA Live 99. The upcoming season was undoubtedly intriguing with the Los Angeles Lakers vying for a threepeat, and Michael Jordan announcing his return to the NBA with the Washington Wizards. The prospect of MJ making another comeback – and for a team other than the Bulls, no less – had been the talk of the 2001 offseason. ESPN even featured a “Return-o-Meter” on their website, tracking every report and rumour related to MJ’s possible comeback right up until the official announcement. The meter swung back and forth, and still sits at “I’m Back”.
As bizarre as it was to see His Airness in a Wizards jersey – and to this day, I do still have mixed feelings about it – there’s no denying that we were interested to see how it would play out. That carried over to the virtual hardwood, as it was going to be the first time since NBA Showdown in 1993 that Michael Jordan would officially appear in an NBA licensed video game as an active player. For roster modders, we’d have to do what once seemed unthinkable: add him to a team that wasn’t the Chicago Bulls! Since MJ was already in NBA Live as a Legend, we had a head start on adding him to any 2002 rosters for NBA Live 2000 and 2001, but he would need to be created in 99.
That wasn’t a difficult task of course, but the idea of creating current 2002 season rosters for NBA Live 99 was admittedly an unusual decision on my part. As a three-year-old game, it was past the height of its popularity, and there were several other players apart from MJ that would need to be added to bring the rosters up to date. On top of that, although I appreciated NBA Live 99 PC, it wasn’t a nostalgic favourite for me. Once again, I’d picked it up after I’d played NBA Live 2000 in order to complete the series, so I hadn’t sunk nearly as much time into it as other basketball games. With that in mind, why did I choose to create and maintain 2002 rosters for NBA Live 99?
Quite simply, NBA Live 2000 and NBA Live 2001 were already being updated by other people, leaving NBA Live 99 as the most recent PC release without an active current roster mod. Furthermore, NBA Live 99 remained popular in the early 2000s, even as the community moved on to the newer games. It’s not exactly comparable to the longevity of games like NBA 2K13 and NBA 2K14, which are still being updated over a decade later, but it was nevertheless a strong release that a number of gamers continued to enthusiastically play and mod. An updated NBA Live 99 PC was also another viable alternative in the wake of NBA Live 2002 being a console exclusive.
Therefore, I saw it as an opportunity to create something for a newer game that still had a dedicated niche following. I’d been updating NBA Live 96 for the 2001 season with a project I titled a “Complete Update“; a slight exaggeration, but as I noted in my retrospective for that mod, it was more comprehensive than basically any other single season roster for NBA Live 96 PC had been. I’d already figured that it would be my farewell to modding one of my all-time favourites – I couldn’t have foreseen that I’d decide to nostalgically pick up the tools and tinker with it again years later – so I was ready to tackle a new challenge. And so, work began on those 2002 season rosters.
Needless to say, it was a larger undertaking than rosters for NBA Live 96! Some new ratings and other player attributes had been added since then, but by far the most time-consuming task was crafting all of the missing players’ appearances. After all, it was no longer just a case of selecting from an array of generic head models that were also used by the original players. Created players couldn’t truly blend in with the original players and their actual cyberfaces, but like most roster modders, I wanted to do the best job I could with the creation tools the game provided. That also included getting any arm bands, knee braces, and other accessories correct, for that extra authenticity.
While there were talented modders making some excellent faces back then, it was rare to distribute them or any other art updates with a roster mod. It was still the age of dialup internet, and most of us were sharing work on free hosts with limited storage space and bandwidth. The idea was to release roster mods that were as detailed as possible, and then gamers could download their preferred faces, jerseys, courts, and so on, in order to completely update their game. Better hosting solutions and community collaborations were on the horizon, but when I made those 2002 rosters for NBA Live 99, art updates were still basically optional extras that everyone sourced themselves.
The initial version of my 2002 rosters for NBA Live 99 was released on October 29th 2001, just in time for opening night. Looking back at the update history in the readme file, the next update came over a month later on December 9th. There hadn’t been any blockbuster trades at that point, but there’d been enough player movement and lineup changes for a new release. The next update on December 18th caught a bug with Brad Miller’s DSTATS that caused him to average wildly incorrect numbers, and fixed some player ratings. After a long break, the next release on February 8th updated the All-Star teams and included the latest transactions, mostly involving journeymen.
A handful of noteworthy deals occurred in the lead up to and on the day of the trade deadline, which was February 21st 2002. Just focusing on the biggest names involved in those trades, the Bulls sent Brad Miller and Ron Artest to the Pacers for Jalen Rose, the Suns acquired Joe Johnson and Randy Brown from the Celtics for Tony Delk and Rodney Rogers (a deal that would soon become quite significant), and the Mavericks traded Tim Hardaway and Juwan Howard to the Nuggets for Avery Johnson, Nick Van Exel, and Raef LaFrentz. Once the dust settled on those deals and some post-deadline signings, I released the next version of the roster update on March 9th.
Additionally, I updated some more player ratings and accessories, as well as the default brackets in Playoffs mode so that they featured the teams and seeding from the 2001 postseason. As suggested, I also assigned faces and portraits to veterans that had been removed by the official patch and subsequently re-added in my update, since the necessary art files were still available. With this release, I also began using a setup file created with Inno Setup, for an easier installation method. I continued to do that for all my rosters right through to the end of my updates for NBA Live 2005, 06, 07, and 08 in 2013, though because it can easily misplace files, I’ve since abandoned that idea.
My final update to those 2002 rosters for NBA Live 99 was released on March 16th, featuring further post-deadline cuts and signings, lineup changes, and a correction to Carlos Arroyo’s jersey number. Sadly, that update included moving Michael Jordan to the Wizards’ injured list, though he would actually return to action a few days later and come off the bench for seven games before sitting out the rest of the season due to knee problems. It’s been over twenty years, so I obviously can’t remember everything that I was thinking at the time. However, it’s quite possible that MJ getting injured and having his season derailed dampened my enthusiasm for continuing with the updates.
Then again, at that point I was really enjoying playing through a Kings Franchise in NBA Live 2002 for PlayStation 2, which naturally took time and enthusiasm away from working on the rosters for NBA Live 99. I was also in my final year of high school, and while I wasn’t nearly as dedicated to my studies as I could and definitely should have been, I obviously had other responsibilities and distractions. Whatever the case – again, it’s been over two decades now – I didn’t end up releasing final 2002 rosters for NBA Live 99. Of course, with so much of the work already done and a relatively small number of transactions to perform, finishing it now is quite feasible.
Indeed, I’ve felt compelled to go back and finish those 2002 rosters ever since Dee and I used them during a co-op session of NBA Live 99! Although I was still proud of the work I’d done all those years ago, I was also bothered to see that I’d overlooked a couple of incorrect dunk packages from the official rosters, and noted a few other issues that could be fixed. Moreover, larger downloads are no longer the obstacle they were in the days of dialup. It’s an incentive to double-check the archives for faces and other art updates that could be used to add further detail to those 2002 rosters, so that they’re even more fun to use in any future retro gaming sessions with NBA Live 99.
Obviously, as with any retro modding projects, the audience for such an update is undeniable small. That doesn’t matter to me though, especially when it comes to polishing up an old project with a few roster moves and any available art. It’s about the joy of creative satisfaction, especially when I have the resources to make it better than I feasibly could have two decades ago. And so, fixing up those 2002 rosters for NBA Live 99 is on my list of modding projects to tackle. After all, retro modding taps into some fond memories the same way that retro gaming does, so it can be just as fun to pick up the tools and sit at the virtual workbench as it is to hit the virtual hardwood!
Unsurprisingly, it’s a rush of nostalgia when I reflect upon creating those 2002 rosters for NBA Live 99 PC. I don’t recall every step of putting the rosters together, but as with my other projects over the years, the satisfaction of having it all come together has stuck with me. I’m certainly reminded of it when I look at the “finished” product now. It also takes me back to my early days running the NLSC. It was a challenging time in the gig, but it was also extremely exciting to be running a site that I’d long admired! There’s the bittersweet nostalgia of my last year of high school, and an NBA season that was memorable but undoubtedly weird, what with MJ in a Wizards jersey.
In short, while I don’t love everything about that time, I have an undeniable fondness for it. That’s nostalgia for you! For me, it’s not about pretending that everything was wonderful and perfect, but rather focusing on the good times, and the experiences that taught me lessons and shaped my journey to this point. Dusting off my 2002 rosters along with NBA Live 99 PC takes me back to a milestone year in my life, one that I can appreciate more in hindsight. It allows me to revisit positive memories, while also creating new memories with a project that I’m ultimately proud of. This is why it’s a blast to dig into the archives and install some mods for our retro gaming sessions!
As far as the rosters themselves, I’d like to think that they represent my growth as a modder. By that point we had some better resources to work with. It was certainly easier to find information on the 2002 season than it had been to source reliable data for my 1996 mod for NBA Live 2001! With a little more maturity, I was able to put aside the bias that infiltrated my 1998 rosters for NBA Live 96. I was developing a project for a bigger audience, which meant learning to deal with more eyes on my work. It was the culmination of all my modding experience to that point, and while I can spot some errors, I’m proud of that roster and enjoy the nostalgia it inspires today.
